Monday, May 21, 2012

San Francisco-based Leap Motion announced its new gesture control system, said to be 100-200 times more accurate than all the existing gesture recognition systems. The Leap is claimed to be able to distinguish individual fingers and track movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. The 3D interaction space is limited by 8 cubic feet. The Leap system retail price is going to be $70.

There is now word on the Leap operating principle. The company's Yutube video demos the new system is action:

The initial technology ideas came from Leap Motion's co-founder and CTO David Holz. David was working on a PhD in mathematics from UNC Chapel Hill and left to pursue Leap Motion. Before that, he was conducting research for NASA on fluid mechanics.

CNET publishes an interview with Leap's CEO Michael Buckwald. Leap Motion announced $12.75M in Series A funding led by Andy Miller of Highland Capital Partners earlier this month.

Leap intends to create an ecosystem with a large number of third-party applications, as opposed to trying to build and popularize those apps itself. "We want to create as vibrant a developer ecosystem as possible, and we're reaching out to developers in all sorts of" fields, CEO Michael Buckwald told CNET. Leap Motion is looking for a few hundred developers, but intends to expand the program by sending out between 15,000 and 20,000 free developer kits.

I guess it is just closer to gamers finger instead sensor being located near display.Meaning some Kinect type of sensor which located right below the gesture input (finger or hand). Resolution depending on angle and distance.